


And If You're Very, Very Lucky

by leafchron



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Angsty Schmoop, Death, Deus Ex Machina, F/F, Holtzmann is too pure for this world, Sorry Holtzmann, Sorry not sorry?, The Ghostbusters are the best family, When you want good things for your fav, also i love you, but you can't help torturing them either
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-09-08 09:01:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8838544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leafchron/pseuds/leafchron
Summary: She always knew, dating someone almost twenty years older than her, that she would be the one left behind, someday.What she didn’t expect, was that it would come so much earlier than she’d thought.





	

For every problem, there is a solution. A good solution, a bad solution, a solution that creates more problems, a solution one has to live with, but still a solution.

Or, the problem goes away by itself, or is alleviated to the point that it no longer poses a problem.

Or it remains but get incorporated into life, becomes a fact of life, and no one has no choice but to live with it, and once one gets used to the problem, it no longer feels like a problem, even if it is.

And finally, there is the death, the end-all, cure-all, final word to all problems. But she’s hoping they’re not there yet, and won’t be for a long time still.

(There is also the biggest problem, the one with no solution, the problem of what happens after death. It is not that she has never pondered that question, not that she has never wondered if she will turn up into a ball of energy, to be vanquished with a shot of proton, or if not what happens to people who don’t get turn into ghosts, what is at the other end of the vortex. She is a scientist, after all, and they’re supposed to ask.

But this, this will she will leave to the philosophers and the poets. She has the present, the splendid now, and it is enough to ground her for now.

Maybe there’s nothing there at the end. She finds it doesn’t bother her at all. She lives as if there’s no tomorrow anyway. Same-diff.)

***

She always knew, dating someone almost twenty years older than her, that she would be the one left behind, someday. She knows, she does not dwell on it. It is a fact to be acknowledged, for when did denial ever do anyone any good and she’s neither a coward nor stupid. But it’s not to be fussed about, not to be kept awake at night by either.

(Although she might have given Dr Gorin a good run for her money by way of the lifestyle she leads and her choice of career.)

What she didn’t expect, was that it would come so much earlier than she’d thought.

She thought she had years, years to unfurl leisurely in front of her, years to be unpacked, to be filled up. Years of companionship, years shared.

She imagined her getting old and cranky, but still beautiful, still brilliant. She imagined walking sticks and trading in myopia glasses for presbyopia glasses. She imagined everyone telling her mentor to settle for tending to gardens and slow long walks, while she would commander every lab still, and stare down every doubter, every well-intentioned but completely mistaken opinion.

She didn’t think it would be a version of young and beautiful and way, way too soon.

***

People assume due to her line of work, she would ponder more about what happens after death. Or she might even know more, have a greater glimpse into the what-next than most.

She knows Erin and Patty dream of versions of heaven, of paradise. She knows Abby is non-committal on the surface and will sprout realms of scientific reasonings and possibilities in lieu of an actual answer, but she knows deep down Abby hopes, cautiously, for the same.

She dreams of a blissful nothingness, like a deep, dreamless sleep. Everything she wants and needs is here in this life. One shot, take it, it’s done, leave it.

But she doesn’t know, for sure, any more than any random woman on the street, and she doesn’t ponder beyond why some people remain as ghosts and why some don’t and what is in the portal beyond and do they all stay there and for how long and what happens to those who don’t and how and why some of them are in this realm and not the other.

Erin and Abby are the ones looking for explanations and personal meanings and she, she just tinkers with the machines, and trades with facts she knows, and is intrigued by what she does learn, and fits what she acquires in the grand worldview and everything else is just…everything else.

So she’s caught flatfooted, just a tad, maybe a whole lot, when it happened.

***

Erin had asked her why she calls Dr Gorin Dr Gorin when one, she’s no longer her student, two, they’re on the same level professionally, of sorts now, and three, they’re actually dating.

She had never questioned it. “Because she’s my mentor?”

“But it wouldn’t be wrong to call her Rebecca, because you guys actually have a personal relationship! If she was even just your friend it would be fine to call her Rebecca, much less when you two are…dating.”

She scratches her nose and shrugs. “She’s always just been Dr Gorin to me,” and from Erin’s dissatisfied, knitted brows look she knows it’s not a good enough answer, it’s not explanatory enough, it’s not what Erin wants, but it has always been Dr Gorin to her.

She thinks back to being twenty, and saying things, and doing things, and feeling fairly confident in her conclusions, but insecure regarding Dr Gorin’s reactions. Dr Gorin telling her. When her academic outcomes were no longer predicated on her advisor, at that point in time and not a second sooner, if and only if, she was still interested, then come find her again.

And she had insisted she wasn’t fickle, she was steadfast, she knew what she wanted, and if Dr Gorin was making promises like that, then she had better be ready to uphold her end of the agreement when the time arrived.

Dr Gorin only smiles slightly to her steely gaze, and says she had better date a few more girls and women in the meantime, otherwise how would she know what it was she thought she really wanted, if she didn’t even know what was going on?

( _And Jillian,_ Dr Gorin calls out one last time to her, _You must always remember this. It’s fine if you change your mind at any point along the way, if your heart beats a different beat. There is no binding agreement, no contractual obligation. The point is always: follow the results to where they lead you, not twist them to your initial hypothesis. It’s perfectly fine._

She doesn’t reply; just walks away. Head high.)

She took her words to heart, and started hitting up the campus. The nice thing about a liberal college, so many girls looking to experiment, so many girls aware of their sexuality. They liked her brashness, her projected confidence, her self-possession, they called her pretty. She found she had the best results when she displayed just a tad of her innate quirkiness in her mating dance, but not the full extent of it. It was fine, they were all just experiments. Part of the process. Not the end goal. Not by a long stretch. She sought out senior girls, girls with experience, girls who were willing to show her, teach her. Girls who trained her well, girls who were generous in sharing what they knew.

She also earns her doctorate in the meantime; Dr Gorin watching over her work carefully, and pretending to not see anything else in her life.

***

After the ceremony and having officially acquired the right to replace the Ms in front of her name with Dr, she finds Dr Gorin standing off the side, holding herself away from the bustle and fuss, unflappable. No matter how many people milled around, Dr Gorin draws her attention like nothing else. Automatic recalibration to the brightest star on the horizon. At her quickened, approaching steps, heavy with anticipation, Dr Gorin only raises a politely enquiring eyebrow.

When she comes face to face with her mentor she doesn’t know what to say.

She could detail her experiments over the past years, and share her results. She could list each and every one of the girls. She could elaborate on everything she’d learnt, like regurgitation for an exam. She could talk so much about everything she experienced, everything she felt. She could go into the full scientific process and study. She could boost, she could be cocky. She could beg.

In the end she settles for, “You were wrong and I was right.” And wants to kick herself immediately, for where was her charm, where were her quips?

But Dr Gorin only smiles at her, going all the way into her eyes, filling up her whole face, and she imagines, into her brain. Which is where the real heart is. Not pulpy dully beating muscle. But the glorious mess of connections and wires and rapidly firing neurons too deep to untangle, too much to bear.

***

(Does she call Dr Gorin Dr Gorin in bed? What else would she call her?)

***

Dr Gorin is the only one allowed to call her Jillian. No one does, no one else is allowed to. Dr Gorin had attempted to start calling her Holtzmann as well at some point, and she had put a stop to that nonsense immediately.

“To everyone else I am Holtzmann, but to you I am Jillian,” she’d explained in her typical unhelpful way.

Dr Gorin acquiesces without further comment. She knows Dr Gorin gets it, no matter how bad her explanations are.

***

After everything that had happened, afterwards they all watch her carefully while trying not to intrude, and she knows they are kind, and they are her family, and they care so much it hurts, and it is a different kind of hurt from when nobody cared, and shouldn’t it be enough for now and she knows they are waiting for her to break, so they can put her back together again.

But she is also waiting; is Dr Gorin one of the spectre on the wrong side of the portal? Will she be one of those who somehow slip through back to here? Will she have moved on completely? Will she be residing in Erin’s version of heaven? Will she become the nothingness she has imagined for so long now?

***

She sleeps in the firestation now, tracks the online sightings obsessively with a newfound ferociousness, and turns up for every case with extreme vigour.

(She doesn’t sleep in their apartment because, well, there are the white sheets that Dr Gorin love so much. And Dr Gorin has never said it out loud, but she knows Dr Gorin loves it when she has her hair down in bed, and it spills over the pristine white sheets, her messy untameable curls.)

But the days turn to weeks to months, and the most important sighting, it doesn’t appear.

***

Patty is worried about her, and tries to get her to leave the firestation, to tear her away from the laptop, to stop her from obsessively tearing apart and putting back together proton packs. Guns. Bombs. Things they have no names for and neither does she. Anything that has a wire, an electric current, a motor, that can be cracked open, taken apart, put back together, faster stronger better. Everything can be put back together better. Everything. There is nothing she cannot piece back together.

She’s being irrational, she knows, and unscientific, and weird beyond anything she has displayed, way out of the realm of anything resembling normal now. Her quirky is not endearing, it’s dysfunctional, it’s broken.

She thinks Dr Gorin would be so disappointed with her, with how she’s behaving now.

She shots back at her, _but you’ve never had to deal with what I am dealing with now, so I don’t think you’re in any position to lecture me on this, Dr Gorin. In this one regard, for once I know much better than you. I could school you in this._

Then realises she is having long conversations with Dr Gorin in her head, unencumbered by the lack of any tangible response.

Then finds she can’t find it in herself to care.

***

What breaks her in the end, ironically, is a dream.

She hadn’t been to her apartment for a while when she makes a trip back. Looking at the pristine white sheets, it exhausts her so much, she decides she had to take a nap on it, dirty clothes be damned.

The dream felt so real, felt so life-like, she wakes up grinning, and turning around to tell Dr Gorin about it, waking her up if she has to.

Then it all hits her at once, everything falling on her.

So she’s been bruised pretty badly as part of her job. She’s had furniture and infrastructure dropped on her, she’s been flung about and thrown against the side of buildings and other heavy immutable objects, she’s been dropped from great height, she’s had things that shouldn’t be in her stabbed or shoot in her, she’s had parts that shouldn’t be out of her body be outside her skin. She’s had bones broken and internal bleeding and torn ligament and ruptured something or another.

Nothing hurts as much as this.

The nap turns into a week, maybe two.

***

She is disturbed from her slumber one afternoon, waking up groggily to a stern admonishment, “Jillian, I hope that’s not spaghetti sauce on my sheets.”

She looks over. It is. The other ghostbusters have been entering her apartment freely, after the first day she was missing from action with a call and some vague rambling about feeling sick and they take turns bringing food and concern and force-feeding her and coaxing her out with another ghost sighting and occasionally cleaning her bedroom, but they must’ve missed a spot. Or maybe it’s a fresh mess. It’s all a blur in her head. Time. Days. The passage of. Reality and what is not. She spends so much time in her eidetic memories they have taken over her experience of reality, and she is fine with that. Her reality isn’t much to speak of at the moment, to be honest. There’s nothing to speak of, to be exact.

And there is Dr Gorin, sitting at the edge of their bed, simultaneously frowning at her, and frowning at the bed.

***

The thing is, everyone wants to be that exception when it comes to good things. The one in millions, billions, who wins the lottery. The one who gets the perfect well-paid job of their dreams they love. The one who finds and keeps true love that endures and never fades. The one to whom good things always happens. The one with the charmed life. The one untouched by tragedy or evil or random acts of misfortune. The one surrounded by love. The one forever buoyed by hope.

She would never admit it to herself, but she had been unconsciously hoping that she would be the exception too, in that one area.

***

Sex with a ghost is weird but only at first. Also one of the things to cross off her bucket list now.

***

Dr Gorin has no more answers for her than when she started out, and Abby and Erin try and fail to find satisfying scientific explanations based on the limitations of the information they currently possess, and in the end everyone acclimatises to her hanging around, but she knows these facts.

The ghostbusters are more family than she will ever deserve.

She is loved.

Dr Gorin always keeps her word.

 

There is always an exception, and if she’s very, very lucky, she gets to be the exception for once.


End file.
